Hooray for Snow!

            It’s a snow day for me, as my university and most other universities in my region are closed today.

            There’s something kind of charming about the way the people of the Ozarks react to snow. We had four inches of fluffy snow fall the night before last, so we are on our second day of weather-related closure—for a wee bit of snow that people even an hour north of here wouldn’t bat an eye at.

            As a people, Ozarkians are programmed for the outdoors, but less for snow forts and imprints of angels on the lawn than for tubing on a lazy river, beer bottle in hand. And they have a point.

            I won’t complain, though, because I have always loved a snow day—and what’s more, I have always loved snow.

            The rest of the country has had a lot more of it than we have—this four-inch snowfall is the first of the season, and it’s already mid-February—but from the perspective of someone who no longer sees much snow, here’s are some reasons to love the white stuff before it’s gone.

• The whole world is a big, clean sheet of paper, just waiting to be written on. It’s that moment just before the rough draft, when ideas fight for the top position. There are not yet any false starts, logical flaws, mixed metaphors, typographical errors—everything is potential.
• It covers our mistakes. My lawn is peppered with dried leaves. Some windblown litter has landed by the fence. There are toys here and there, and we never trimmed back the remnants of any of our summer blooms. There is plenty of work to be done outside, but you’d never know it today.
• It’s a chance to rest. Nearly the entire community—schools, universities, daycares, churches—has decided to sit this day out and try again tomorrow. There will be work to catch up on, of course, for all of us, but for today, a respite is sanctioned. Time in front of the fireplace is acceptable. TV on the couch is A-OK. And throwing snow at each other in the yard? Well, that’s the best use of all for our time.
• It’s not gray. Sun is hitting the snow and reflecting into the windows, and the house is bright and cheerful. I, for one, have been working indoors, moving from one office to another without a chance to step out into the sun, and I needed a little brightness and cheer.
• There’s a funny sideshow that happens in academia, when all of the professors panic about what the snow day will do to their lesson plans. They wring their hands; they fret that they won't be able to get everything in over the course of the semester. But I like to remind them that they're not getting “everything” in anyway, no matter the subject. They can’t teach all of American history, all of Modern poetry, all of physics, all of psychology—not in sixteen weeks! And one class session isn't going to subtract significantly from all of that not-everything they're teaching. Not even two class sessions will make much of a dent. I enjoy witnessing the flutter. It reminds me of how dedicated and serious my colleagues are, and it invites me to up my game, too.
• The birds, which, here, can typically afford to turn up their noses at inexpensive mixes of seed, really seem to appreciate the feeder on a snowy day, and I enjoy the show they put on for me there.

In short, there are many reasons to love a snow day—just one of the many times that a break from routine, a set of limitations, can remind us of the bounty of our daily lives.

The Job of Faculty: Teaching, Service, Research, and ... Vacuuming?

            There seems to be a movement afoot to put uppity university faculty in their place.

            This happens in ways both large and small. In Wisconsin, for instance, Governor Scott Walker, a college dropout himself, is actively trying to dismantle the state’s university system. He has gutted funding and attempted to skewer the system’s mission statement so that it no longer includes “the search for truth” as one of its core values.

            In my own workplace, a small liberal arts college, I have to empty my own trash. Let’s admit at the outset that this is far less nefarious than what’s happening in Wisconsin. It’s sort of a silly thing—I noticed that my lunch wrappings were amassing aver a number of weeks, and upon inquiring, I found that I was supposed to take care of the office trash myself.

            So do we have university faculty empty their own trash to save time for the important work of the custodial staff? I’m not so sure about this (although, to be sure, the custodial staff is stretched quite thinly). There is currently an all-hands-on-deck mindset at my institution, with faculty, administration, and staff alike aligning to stretch resources, and truly working together on many important aspects of university life. Taking care of our own waste is an egalitarian notion, and I can appreciate that (provided the administrators are all emptying their own trash, too—I haven’t asked if this is the case). Mine is, for the most part, an egalitarian institution, and I love it for that.

            But I have some suspicions about the motives for turning faculty into their own custodians, especially when there is a national drive to depict faculty as layabouts who teach their three or four sections and then put their feet up and pluck at their elbow patches.

            Faculty don’t just teach in the classroom, obviously. They work one-on-one with students and mentor them beyond the end of the semester; they prepare for classes and grade papers and projects; they perform the research that they later “profess” to their students; they write and try to publish, and they stay current on the research of their peers. And they also participate in the life of the institution, which includes committee work, governance, recruiting, and much more.

            These days they also empty their trash, because who do they think they are, expecting someone else to do it.

            As it happens, it is also our responsibility to vacuum our office carpets. This dictate came several months back, and it may well be that everyone has forgotten this odd moment in the life of the institution. Maybe we all expected normal operations to resume at some future point, but no one ever got around to restoring custodial functions to those people who take pride in maintaining our classroom and common areas so beautifully, despite limited personnel.

            But there has been a national drive to force faculty to be held accountable for their time. Governors and legislators are pushing for increased workload. The effort to paint the professoriate as laggards looks from the outside like a coordinated Republican rallying cry, with one GOP governor after another pointing to faculty as a problem that hurts state finances. And this viewpoint even extends to private institutions like my own, where courseload increases are being contemplated.

            Depicting faculty as bums puts them on the defensive. So does depicting higher education as a realm of constant crisis. Well-meaning professionals try to do more for the good of the order, and they start to believe that their jobs are in constant jeopardy. (Remember, the American Association of University Professors maintains that tenure is not a reward for super-special people; rather, job security is a necessary condition of academic freedom, and therefore tenure should happen as a natural course of action after a successful probationary period.) The crisis model, and the constant invocation of the all-hands-on-deck mindset, seems designed to make faculty feel unsafe in their jobs.

            I even had a brief qualm about writing this blogpost. Will I be reprimanded—will I lose my job? I was careful not to name my institution; I’d hate for a prospective student to do a web search on, oh, let’s call it Zoory University, and find a rant about emptying trash instead of a glowing report about how life at ZU is all cupcakes and butterflies. (Remember—all hands on deck.)

            But this is not a rant about trash. It’s a very reasonable speculation that the nationally orchestrated higher education crisis mode could be behind some of the small, daily decisions that impact the quality of faculty worklife.

            And come to think of it, I already know that my three-year contract is not being renewed. (The increasing use of non-tenure track faculty provides flexibility to an institution, while also keeping faculty on their best behavior.) Nothing expressed here is so problematic that administrators are going to pound on my door and smack my cheek with a leather glove. Those folks aren’t going to read Better View of the Moon anyhow.

            But I have a feeling that it may be important for faculty to embrace at least a little bit of uppitiness. Administrators should put us in our place—which is in the classroom, and the lab, and the research library, and the studio—and leave us there to do what we do best: search for truth, inspire students, and breathe life into our unvacuumed institutions.

Standing at the Intersection of Art and Grace

            Someone was mean to me once, and it threw me ten years off course.

            It is sobering to look around in my mid-forties and realize that I’ve squandered some important creative years, all because I took to heart some freakishly harsh criticism from a person I loved, a person who should have done better by me.

            The “who” doesn’t matter. What happened is this: I was in the middle of a creative project that thrilled me, and I talked about it to one of the people I cared most about. This person sat me down and told me all of the things that were wrong with me. I felt I was better than everybody else. I lorded my accomplishments over others. I flaunted my education. I refused to speak normally, and instead used big words and complicated constructions to say basic things.

            This were personal criticisms, not poetic ones, but they rose from my attempt to express that moment of artistic glee—I had a project that was changing my creative life and making me feel like I had real potential as a poet.

            By the end of that conversation, I had put my pen in a drawer, figuratively speaking, and it stayed there for a decade.

            The other day, a friend mentioned that she was worried about sharing her work with her loved ones. Other friends piped in with advice. The work is important, they said; the loved ones need to hear it and support it, or they are not worth loving at all.

            Sharing work with special people is tricky. I’m always hearing artists talk about the fear that accompanies a family member reading their poetry or seeing their visual art in a gallery. And it may not be worth the trouble. When loved ones are also artists, it’s easier; they know how to honor the humanity within the work yet separate the product from the creator. Loved ones who aren’t artists may look for themselves in work; they may psychoanalyze the creator or see something unhealthy about the way we work through things on page or canvas.

            It seems like the best move may be to go ahead and keep work and loved ones separate, unless family, friends, or lovers seek it out on their own, or otherwise show readiness for confronting the artist through the work. I certainly experienced no profit from excitedly talking about my life-changing project with someone who didn’t know or care what it meant to me.

Art, including literary art, can be regarded sort of like, say, gardening is. It’s lovely to hear that someone has planted dahlias in the side yard; we can hear about the bold blossoms, maybe glance at them and appreciate their beauty and the fact that someone has cultivated it. We don’t need to investigate the roots and stalk. We don’t need to count the petals. Seeing the happiness of the gardener is sufficient. That person—and maybe any person who increases, rather than decreases, the beauty in the world—should be congratulated, cheered on.

            It is tempting to be angry with the person behind this moment that never stops being horrible. (I go back to the conversation from time to time, and it hurts just as much after all this time as it did at the moment it was happening.) The fact that this person made the wrong call doesn’t even factor in. An MFA in creative writing is not the kind of education one flaunts. A non-tenure-track job, lowest rank in the institution, is not an accomplishment to be lorded. Being awkward and stilted in conversation is not a source of pride. The poetry, though? That’s a very reasonable source of delight. A professor I had once told me that there are two kinds of poetry: good poetry and great poetry. The act of making art is, in itself, ennobling, whatever the product.

            I think the rightful focus of anger is obvious. It’s me. Most people are nice and supportive—even strangers hold doors and spare a smile. We run into stinkers from time to time, though, and from time to time, we are the stinkers. The only unforgivable act in this scenario is not reporting for duty—not answering the call of those poems that tried to find their way into being during that empty decade. Who knows what words might have visited me, had I been in position and ready to accept them?

            The unkindness of others shouldn’t change me, and I won’t let it change me again. Whatever the actions of people around me, I choose, forever after, to be a loving person and a gracious host.

Learning By Connecting

            I have always been fascinated by learning, and for most of my life, I have devoted time and energy to it, both inside and outside of formal classes. I am a student right now, actually, in a TESOL certificate program at Missouri State University, and that has me hitting the books and writing papers and taking tests for the first time in years. However, I am also trying to learn more about a number of subjects on my own. Geography is one. I enjoy reading about countries of the world; in my spare time I like to see how quickly I can fill the names of countries into a blank map. I’m getting pretty good—fast, and clear on the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia, Guyana and French Guiana, Malawi and Mozambique.

            I teach writing and speaking to international students, and right now (in fact, at this moment, as I write along with them on the overhead projector) they are writing an essay about their unique learning styles. It is a good question to ask—What kind of learner are you? For my students, the answers run the gamut, from the styles American students are well versed in—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—to their more personal preferences, like studying with others or listening to music while they work. (If my students end up being the ones who come up to you at the start of the first session of your lit class to announce that they are kinesthetic learners and may require appropriate accommodations, I apologize, and wish you well with the challenge of applying tactile elements to your lesson plans on Jane Austen’s Emma or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.)

            My students’ assignment has me thinking about my own learning style, which is as idiosyncratic as anyone’s. For me, learning starts with seeing, whether that is with words on a page or pictures on a website. As I read, I get snagged on interesting words, and then sound takes over. Encountering a musical name like “Tannu Tuva” sends me Googling—what does Tuva look like? What do the people there do?

            Turns out that this formerly independent state is now part of the Russian Federation, and Tannu Tuva is no more. The area is properly called the Tyva Republic. It is a lush, green place, not unlike Montana in appearance. One thing that some people there do, as it turns out, is throat-singing—a method of song-making that allows them to produce multiple notes in the back of the throat. Tuva, as it turns out, was an interesting place, well worth learning more about.

            My brief exploration into Tannu Tuva is indicative of my own learning style—independent, natural, sporadic, curious, disorganized. I love factoids and I love people, and there is nothing more fascinating than learning how people in other places get through their days.

            It’s something that fascinates me about my students, too. What is life like in Gujarat, in western India? What is it like in a smaller, history-rich city in China? In Riyadh? I wonder—and I ask. My learning style means that they tell me a detail about their country and I Google away, trying to imagine where they’re from, what they’re about, what they do and love and play and sing and eat.

            I know that they’re a lot of fun to spend time with. They’re good-natured, and they go along with my sometimes-bizarre lesson plans. They are happy to write and speak and share their truths, and they have gotten over their fear of making a mistake, abandoning it in favor of their desire to communicate something essential.

            I guess my own learning style, if I’m to conclude our assignment, is to position myself in the vicinity of fascinating people and bug them until I begin to know some things they know. It is to reveal aspects of my own life so that they will, out of a sense of decorum or pity, reciprocate with details from theirs. It is, in short, to forge connections where I can.